Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Hugh Sykes

A couple of snippets from the BBC's Hugh Sykes, reporting from Beirut on Radio 4’s PM yesterday evening.

“There are already countless children here in Beirut traumatised by repeatedly hearing this…” - a recording of an explosion is then played, after which Skyes continues - “…rather more violent than a Katyusha.” (Clip - mp3, 15 secs)

Not to the people killed, injured and made homeless by Katyushas. And I believe Israelis have children too.

Sykes then linked to James Reynolds in Israel who reported that the onslaught of Katyushas has not weakened Israeli support for the current military campaign. There was no pause to play sound effects during this segment. Reynolds then handed back to Sykes, who seemed to have taken his colleague's report personally. He’d already made his point comparing Katyushas and Israeli attacks but now felt compelled to repeat it:

“Here of course the view is very different from that. People here in Lebanon think the Katyusha rockets have a minor effect compared with the HUGE [his emphasis] devastating Israeli bombardment of the south of Lebanon and of parts of this city very frequently, and they feel that quite often there is an imbalance in the reporting of this conflict[my emphasis] and that not enough attention is paid to the fact that approximately ONE THOUSAND [his emphasis] Lebanese lives have been lost compared with a few dozen Israelis[my emphasis].” (Clipmp3, 31 secs)

Note the words Sykes stresses for emotional impact.

Leaving aside the veracity of Lebanese casualty figures, what is really disgraceful is Sykes' dismissal of nearly 100 Israeli deaths as “a few dozen”. Would he belittle a hundred Lebanese deaths in the same casual way? I think not.

4 Comments:

As for the casualty figures....I believe that he is referring to the difference between Civilian casualties in each country. There have been near 1,000 Civilian casualties in Lebanon and near 100 casualties in Israel, most of which are Military casualties -- leaving him to see say 'a few dozen' in reference to Israeli civilian casualties.

And? There were countless - one would imagine hundreds of thousands - of children in London and the rest of the country during five years of WWII who heard fighter planes overhead and bombs dropping. And that was a real war, between legitimate states.

This current "conflict" is being prosecuted, with the full opera chorus, lighting, choreography and orchestration arranged by Hezbollah pr flaks, aka "photographers" and "rescue operations directors and coroners".

Hezbollah attacked Israelis on Israeli soil. They store their munitions in Beirut schools and houses. They shoot off their innocuous - if they're not effective, why are you using them, dumbkopfs? - Katyushas, which don't really do any harm, into Israel. And kidnap Israeli soldiers from Israel.

And the aggressive Israelis have the arrogance to respond! I mean, go figure!

Some Lebanese children in houses and schools that are munitions storehouses die, despite the Israelis leafleting the areas they intend to attack advising the civilian population to get out. As far as I and most sane people are concerned, those children were murdered by Hezbollah.

And how many are there, anyway, given that the same corpses make more appearances than Judy Garland in a farewell tour, in different venues, courtesy of Green Helmet Man and White T-Shirt man?

Perhaps more Lebanese than were desirable from a Hezbollah point of view did indeed gather their children and get out of the area, in response to the Israeli leaflets. Maybe that's why Green Helmet Man and White T-Shirt man may have been so short of pathetic bodies they had to re-use the ones they'd got.

Over on LGF, they showed that many of these bodies being paraded didn't have any dust (from collapsing buildings) in their hair; there was no blood on their bodies despite their having supposedly been killed by collapsing buildings; mostly, their clothes weren't torn; and there were other inconsistencies, the greatest of which was, many were already in an advanced state of rigor mortis.